The Day Before.. Hilton at Gatwick

My alarm went off at 8am this morning and I was up like a shot! I had a shower and packed some last minute bits like my make-up, toothpaste, etc and put liquids into plastic bags ready for the overnight stay.

We booked two family rooms at the Hilton at Gatwick for tonight so it was a little stressful packing things for an overnight stay as well as the actually holiday. I packed a separate (small) suitcase with clothes to travel in and bottles of shampoo, toothpaste, eye make-up remover, face wash, shower gel, etc which just had a tiny bit left in the bottom of each bottle that I could just throw away at the hotel in the morning.

I wrote out the tags for our suitcases and attached the ones that I made for the kids...

Then tried to do online check in as we were hoping to change our seats to row 22, but for some reason it wouldn’t let me check in. We figured as we would be doing twilight check in anyway, we would leave it. We still had pretty good seats anyway so we weren’t too worried if we couldn’t be moved.
I printed some coupons off and text Tracy...

We had some lunch, hoovered, mopped and cleaned the house, emptied the bins and the fridge, set timers and set out all the pet bowls and things. We booked a pet sitter to take care of our dog, cat, fish and chickens. I wrote her a quick note and said goodbye to Jacob and we were out of the door an hour later than planned at 2:30pm.

Jacob looking all sorry for himself

We drove the 40 minute journey to my Mum and Dad’s in Northampton and had a quick cup of tea and biscuits before loading up the car. We have a Megane Scenic which has a massive boot, so we put the back seats down and managed to fit all 7 suitcases in the back and all the hand luggage, Hilton luggage and the kids went in my Mum and Dad’s car.
We popped round to say bye to my Nan as she was really worried about our flight. She hates flying and kept saying “my whole world is going up in that plane” so we thought we would pop in and see her before we left.

We got on to the motorway for Gatwick at 4pm. The journey was uneventful and pretty boring. The traffic was awful due to road works and it took almost 3 hours to get there. I was dying for a wee could have killed for a ‘shewee’ at that point!!! Lol. If you don’t know what a Shewee is, then check out this delightful site for all your shewee needs... http://www.shewee.com/categories/Shewee-Products/

I had booked car parking with meet and greet with Cophall Farm and gave them a quick ring to tell them we were almost there and we finally rocked up to the Hilton at 6:50pm. Cophall Farm turned up 5 minutes later. We unloaded the luggage onto a trolley and we waved goodbye to the car. My Mum and Dad also booked car parking with meet and greet using a company called Looking4parking through Air Parking. www.looking4parking.com. However they parked their car in Hilton’s car park over night so that we could store our overnight luggage in there in the morning. When they called Hilton to enquire how much it would cost they said it would be £14 which wasn’t too bad.

Paul waited outside with the suitcases on a trolley ready to do twilight check in while the rest of us went upstairs in the Hilton to check in. Bit of a strange set up and a bit of a hassle dragging all the bags up the escalator or waiting for a lift. There was a slight queue at the check in desk, but it went down pretty quickly. I left the queue to go to the toilet as I couldn’t hold it anymore. The toilets were annoyingly located downstairs over the other side of the bar area. By the time I got back 2 minutes later Mum was at the front of the queue at the check in desk. Good old Virgin had forgotten to change our booking. When Tracy decided to come to Florida with us at the last minute, we changed our Hilton booking from a family room and a double room to two family rooms; one with a double bed and bunk bed and the other room with two double beds. However we were still stuck with a family and a double room. They had no other family rooms available so they said they would put a fold-away bed in the double room for her. We also had an interconnecting room which was great.

By the time we got up to our rooms the bed was already there and made up and the inter-connecting doors had been unlocked.

The rooms were nice and the family room was very spacious. Amelia loved it, running around and jumping on the beds!

We left our bags in the rooms, I changed Amelia’s nappy and put her in her pushchair and went back downstairs to meet Paul who was struggling with the bags as it was now raining quite heavily and he was trying to move them all under the canopy on his own, bless him. We got to him and started to walk through the walkway into the airport only to find when we got to the end that there was a massive flight of stairs! There was no way we could get all the cases up there and Amelia in her pushchair. Luckily there was a guy at the end who told us we had to go back into the hotel on the first floor and go through the walkway there. It would have been helpful if they had told us this at check in! So back up in the lift we went... two lifts as we couldn’t all fit in one, crossed the walkway into the airport and went through to departures.

Finally got to the Virgin Atlantic check in desk at 8:25pm and was surprised at the length of the queue. I was half expecting it to be empty but there must have been at least 4 big families waiting in front of us. I was getting worried that we would miss twilight check-in as it closed at 9pm. Luckily we got through pretty quickly. That was when the problems started.

It seemed the reason why we couldn’t check in online this morning was because a seat hadn’t been allocated for Amelia. They couldn’t tell me the reason why and when she phoned through to Virgin Atlantic at Heathrow they couldn’t help and said we would have to go back to the Virgin Holidays desk in the morning and get her a ticket issued. When we first booked this holiday she was classed as an infant and wasn’t entitled to a seat as we were due to go last December. But when we postponed the holiday to this May, Amelia turned 2 in the April and was then classed as a child and so we had to pay for the upgrade for a seat for her. There wasn’t a chance I was going to pay another £149 for a seat. I was fuming and i'm sure I saw steam coming from Paul's ears.

Mum, Dad, Tracy and Oliver all checked in fine as they all had the same surname. Although Oliver is my son, he still remains undecided whether or not he wants to change his surname to the same as Paul, Amelia and I’s. They were also kind enough to let us check our cases in with theirs so at least we didn’t have to lug those around with us. So with half of us checked in, we left the virgin desk to get some dinner as we were all now starving and would come back early in the morning to sort out Amelia’s ticket and check the three of us in.

It was now 8:50pm so we rushed upstairs to Giraffe as I had printed a voucher from www.eatdrinkandfly.com to get 10% off. However just as we got there they were turning another family away as they were closing at 9pm. I was gutted. I was really looking forward to eating there. I was so tired and cheesed off about Amelia’s ticket. We walked around the corner and saw that Wetherspoons The Beehive was still open and there were people eating in there, so we rushed in and found a table. It was really busy and the only tables we could find were really high ones with bar stools. I had trouble sitting at them and I didn’t know how Amelia was going to manage as a highchair would have been too small. Then Dad noticed a few tables sort of off of the restaurant kind of like a little room on its own to the right of the bar.

There were a few men drinking but they left 5 minutes after we went through. We got a table at the end with a perfect view of the planes coming in to land. Even though it was now dark, we could still see their lights as they came in. It was quite cold in this part of the restaurant and I wished I had bought a cardigan.
All of a sudden I noticed a hideous smell coming from Amelia and realised that she had filled her nappy! Great. I had left her bag on the bed back in the hotel room. It was miles away right across the airport. Paul said he would run and get it and told me to order his meal. He had a double cheese burger, Dad and I had a double chicken burger, Oliver had an all day breakfast, Tracy had chorizo pasta and Mum had a salad. Amelia had one of the chicken breasts from my burger and some of my chips.

Paul’s Burger!

Paul came back to The Beehive and changed Amelia and the food arrived 2 minutes before he got back. The burgers all came on a wooden chopping board which I liked. It was a really nice meal and reasonably priced. For the six meals, plus a round of drinks, it came to £65.

We skipped desserts and made our way back to the hotel room where we had tea and Fox’s jam sandwich creams which I had brought with me.
The rooms at the Hilton were OK. The beds were clean and comfortable but the corridors in the hotel smelled damp and the bathrooms and decorating just seemed a bit dated and in need of renovating. To be honest I don’t think it was worth £114 a night and we probably wouldn’t stay there again. Although for location and convenience for twilight check-in it was perfect.

By the time we had got ready for bed and settled the kids it was midnight. We were all so excited and I had trouble sleeping. I think I got about 2 hours in the end. Just kept thinking about Disney World and Dreaming of Mickey...

Not so much in the way of a report for today, a better day tomorrow; Travel Day and Downtown Disney